The end of history, US culture wars and Africa
A retreat from multilateralism is redefining global power relations, with far-reaching consequences for Africa and the rules-based system.
Events in the US should make it clear that the world is at a pivotal point in the global balance of power, perhaps more significant than the end of the Cold War in 1989. Driving this is the culture war within the US, which, as explicitly stated in the November 2025 US National Security Strategy, is being exported to Europe with the intention of installing populist leaders who would support its remaking in the image and under the leadership of the US.
It is impossible to achieve such uniformity and common purpose among countries where leadership is elected democratically and where policies change from one electoral cycle to the next. This is a goal that even the US, with all its military might, will not be able to achieve, now without many of its diplomats and development practitioners following the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Though shortsighted and unworkable, the implications of the National Security Strategy are breathtaking in their scope and ambition.
The administration of US President Donald Trump is not seeking international governance reform. The rupture that is engineering rejects the fundamentals of the rules-based system that has been at the core of Western intellectual thought and efforts since the end of the Second World War. The ambition to increase US military spending to US$1.5 trillion in 2027 and the recent decision to withdraw from an additional 66 international organisations, treaties and conventions follow the same trajectory. In addition to establishing its hegemony over North, Central and South America, President Trump aims to instrumentalise Europe, the Middle East and Africa to serve American national interests through the creation of a crass instrument, the Board of Peace, with himself as chair and its terms of reference framed in narrow, transactional terms.
For Africa, these shifts are not abstract. The continent sits at the intersection of the global energy transition, critical mineral supply chains, demographic change and future growth, making it both strategically valuable and politically exposed in a more transactional world order. How major powers choose to engage Africa—and how African states respond—will therefore be an early test of whether the emerging global system fragments into spheres of influence or evolves towards a more plural and negotiated order.
Africa sits at the intersection of the global energy transition, critical mineral supply chains, demographic change and future growth, making it both strategically valuable and politically exposed
US views on its cultural supremacy are deeply embedded in US mainstream academic thinking. In recent history, the most prominent of these views came from Samuel P. Huntington, who suggested in The Clash of Civilisations that, following the end of the Cold War, global conflict would be driven not by ideological differences but by cultural and civilizational divisions. Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilisations in response to an earlier essay published by his now equally famous student, Francis Fukuyama, which later became a book, The End of History and the Last Man.
Fukuyama took a starkly contrarian view to Huntington, arguing that liberal democracy had emerged as the ultimate form of human governance following the end of the Cold War, a claim for which he has been lampooned in recent years, although his analysis is nuanced and complex.
In Trump's America, the premise that humanity prefers democracy, equity and respect for human rights, as espoused by Fukuyama, has been replaced by Huntington's perspective. Thus, the National Security Strategy is explicit in rejecting the notion of imposing on others ‘democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and history.’
In 2004, Huntington published a less well-known book, Who Are We? America’s Great Debate on American national identity, in which he argued that ‘Anglo-Protestant culture has been central to the American identity for three centuries’ but that ‘in the late twentieth century … the salience and substance of this culture were challenged by a new wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, the popularity in intellectual and political circles of the doctrine of multiculturalism and diversity, the spread of Spanish as the second American language and the Hispanization trends in American society, the impact of diasporas and their homeland governments, and the growing commitment of elites to cosmopolitan and transnational identities.’
Huntington is one of many public figures who set the stage for today’s culture war between Democrats and Republicans, between urban and rural Americans, which is now playing out in the US and, due to its relative material and soft power, globally.
Amongst other options for America’s future that Huntington outlined in Who Are We?, was ‘a revitalised America reaffirming its historic Anglo-Protestant culture, religious commitments, and values and bolstered by confrontations with an unfriendly world.’ It is along this reasoning that Trump and associates hold, in the National Security Strategy, that ‘the era of mass migration must end’ and that ‘we want Europe to remain European [i.e. white and Christian], to retain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation’. Few would disagree with the latter.
For Africa, the National Security Strategy calls for partnerships with ‘selected, capable and reliable states’ that promise a good return on investment in oil, gas, nuclear and critical minerals. Only pliable, subservient states need to apply, and who knows what happens tomorrow when an ill-considered tweet or remark upsets the king. The Trump administration's approach strips Africa of agency, reducing a continent of 1.3 billion people to pawns on a chessboard.
The Trump administration's approach strips Africa of agency, reducing a continent of 1.3 billion people to pawns on a chessboard
The National Security Strategy is a cautionary tale of overreach. Eventually, little will survive, except for the damage it causes to the US, the West and the liberal, rules-based project. Africa, too, will suffer given the National Security Strategy’s calls for partnerships with ‘selected, capable and reliable states’. The reality is that Trump’s America does not want partners, but lackeys.
Africans do not want to be instrumentalised, but their options with China are limited, given the popular demand for democratic accountability and growth amongst its young and connected population.
Historically, the source of US economic growth and dynamism has been its role as a cultural melting pot, welcoming immigrants and benefiting from migration. Without an ongoing influx of young migrants, the US economy is likely to expand only at a moderate pace, despite its relatively high fertility rates compared to those of other high-income countries.
The EU is already in dire straits in this regard, and asking its 27 members to close the doors to legal migrants from non-European countries, including Africa, is practically impossible to pursue from a labour demand perspective. It will be detrimental to the development ambitions of literally every member, given the elderly age profile of their populations.
These realities open the door to a strategic opportunity for Africans and Europeans to align with others of the Global South to defend and advance a new vision for a rules-based world fit for the future. Colonial baggage complicates any such ambition, but in these times the choices are stark—align with the US or China, or support an association based on rules, not power.
Are European and African leaders up to the challenge?
Image: geralt/Pixabay
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